Do-Not-Track on the Ropes as Ad Industry Ditches W3C

The ad industry's privacy group just may have sounded the death knell for the worldwide Do Not Track initiative. The Digital Advertising Alliance announced it will depart the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group. That's the broad collective of privacy advocates, technologists, ad industry representatives and lawyers who have struggled over the past two years to define online tracking and determine a standard for a browser-based do-not-track mechanism, to no avail.